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Autre Publication Scientifique Année : 2013

Activation and energy transfers supporting potential peptide protometabolisms at the origin of living systems

Activation et transferts d’énergie supportant des protométabolismes peptidiques potentiels à l’origine des systèmes vivants

Robert Pascal
Grégoire Danger

Résumé

Life on Earth constitutes a historical process that developed by complexification starting from chemical systems. It is considered in this project that physico-chemical driving forces and contingency are responsible of this process since its early beginning. Theoretical aspects will constitute both the starting point of this project and a matter of investigation to contribute to a better understanding of the physical origin of complexity. Within this perspective, the emergence of protometabolisms defined as networks of chemical reactions proceeding under far from equilibrium conditions and involving nonlinear features and therefore being capable of generating self-organisation (associated with a local decrease in entropy compensated by the irreversibility of the overall process) is a key step for the origin of life. Chemical networks of this kind must work as unidirectional sequences of reactions or preferably as unidirectional reaction cycles in which a further process of positive chemical feedback would be capable of generating systems endowed with autocatalytic properties and then behaving in a nonlinear way. Determining which pathways could have constantly or repeatedly fed these systems with energy to maintain the far from equilibrium state is then essential to understand how self-organisation could emerge. This approach is applied to the formation of biopolymers capable of functional activities that is generally considered as a prerequisite for the origin of life. Our original goal is to propose an overall scenario integrating the formation of peptides and other related processes to build a network capable of giving rise to emergent properties related to the connections of the different parts of the network. The project is aimed at understanding how peptides could be formed under prebiotic conditions and how energy sources could have been coupled to peptide bond formation. But it is not limited to this goal since random peptides made from racemic mixtures of amino acids are unlikely to adopt definite structures needed for specific activity so that it will address the question of the emergence of selectivity (and stereoselectivity) or that of improbable but dynamically stable states. Lastly the emergence of translation at an early stage of evolution suggests that the chemistry of amino acids and peptides can be coupled to that of an information carrier supporting the hypothesis of a peptide-nucleotide co-evolution. All these topics will be experimentally investigated by monitoring the reactions through common methods of analytical chemistry and organic chemistry (NMR, HPLC, MS, UV…).

Domaines

Chimie
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Dates et versions

hal-03333533 , version 1 (03-09-2021)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-03333533 , version 1

Citer

Robert Pascal, Grégoire Danger. Activation and energy transfers supporting potential peptide protometabolisms at the origin of living systems: PeptiSystems. 2013. ⟨hal-03333533⟩

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